BWM blog

Thursday 28 May 2009

Welcome to the Big White Monkey blog

We should start with a short potted history of BWM, a small company who started doing modifications to valve amplifiers,mainly the small powered versions such as Epiphone Jnr. After doing so many we decided it may be better to actually make our own with all the mods in place.

This was a long process and several failed attempts due to very bad quality control from several companies we dealt with. We finally found a company we were happy with and started production of our Chimp Class A single ended 5 watt beauty. The amp was to be different than all of its competitors, in many ways. First we made it quieter than all the competition, something that we had been doing for some time with Epiphones. We added a tone circuit which was another thing we had been doing with small valve combos. The circuit has the capability to take the unit from mild crunch to high gain.

Then we added the triode switch, a common request from valve amp owners, to decrease the volume whilst still allowing the player to run the valves hot. Not satisfied with that, we added a built in attenuator to lower the volume even further.

We stressed a 6L6 to be used in the power section as nearly all small combos go for 6V6 or ELs. This provides the ideal power ratio in this amp. Another benefit of our amps though is the ability to change to any valve that will fit without the need for rebiasing. To keep costs down we went for the smallest enclosure we could get. We have many requests for additions, I tell them "look at the board"(High Quality no PCB machined solder) there is no room inside the amp for anything else. We did however add a speaker out socket to enable people to extend to cabs.

These amps are half the price of the competition and yes they are made in China like the competition, but to our design specs. We are adding 3 more models in the near future and a range of pedals are in production at this very moment. We hope with continued support from like minded simians, we can beat the big guy and keep ourselves in the game producing top quality gear for budget prices.